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Live from Golgotha: Gore Vidal's Second "Fifth Gospel"

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Live from Golgotha: Gore Vidal's Second Volume 22, number 2, October 1995 Heather Neilson LIVE FROM GOLGOTHA: GORE VIDAL'S SECOND "FIFTH GOSPEL" In 1989, after the publication of Hollywood, his twenty-first novel, Gore Vidal talked of his projected next novel, a semi-autobiographical account of the United States between the years 1945 and 1950 (Delaney). This novel, to be entitled The Golden Age, would have been, and may yet appear as, the seventh in Vidal's sequence of novels about American political history - the sequence which began with Burr in 1974.1 However, when his twenty-second novel appeared in 1992, it was not The Golden Age but Live From Golgotha, subtitled The Gospel According to Gore Vidal. Live From Golgotha appeared almost simultaneously with Harold Bloom's The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation. Through an examination of various sects and cults in the United States from the early nineteenth century to the present, Bloom argues in The American Religion for the existence of a tacit national religion which is essentially based upon the valorising of the individual over the congregation or community. This hypothetical American religion is only putatively Christian, being more accurately identifiable with Gnosticism; it takes the form of an internalised quest for identity and some form of immortality. "There are tens of millions of Americans," he says, "whose obsessive idea of spiritual freedom violates the normative basis of historical Christianity, though they are incapable of realising how little they share of what once was considered Christian doctrine" (263). Bloom's notorious theory of the anxiety of influence - of the agonistic, albeit mainly unacknowledged, competition in which the writer engages with his or her precursors - has affinities with his friend Gore Vidal's many and various representations of quasi-Oedipal and fraternal conflicts in his fiction. Notwithstanding the limitations of Bloom's inductive approach - his evasions of certain issues of American social and racial heterogeneity - his reflections in The American Religion on the continual multiplication of offshoots of the original Christian church, and the inevitable mutation of a religious message with the passing of time, are attractive to me insofar as they resonate with Vidal's concerns manifested in his novels about religion. 2 Vidal is manifestly hostile to Christianity as institution, as distinct from the man Jesus as represented in the Christian Gospels, or the individual seeker for spiritual truth. His preoccupation with Christianity is consistent with the predominant subject of his work, namely the ways in which knowledge and belief are acquired, LIF4c 79 Heather Neilson, "Live From Golgotha ". recorded and passed down. In 1965, discussing his reasons for writing the novel Juliari, Vidal remarked that if we do not understand Christianity, then we cannot make much sense of the world we live in, because our society, morally and intellectually, for good and ill, is the result of that great force. (99) In Live From Golgotha, he offers a dubious aid to our further understanding of Christianity in a fictional narrative of Saint Timothy, the first bishop of Ephesus, purportedly written in the year 96 A.D. The biblical Timothy first appears in Acts 16 as a disciple of good repute whom Paul had wanted as his travelling companion. To appease the Jewish converts to the new religion, Paul had him circumcised. Vidal's novel begins with Timothy's recurring nightmare about the surgery. In the beginning was the nightmare, and the knife was with Saint Paul, and the circumcision was a Jewish notion and definitely not mine. I am Timothy, son of Eunice the Jewess and George the Greek. I am fifteen. I am in the kitchen of my family's home in Lystra. I am lying stark naked on a wooden table. I have golden hyacinthine curls and cornflower-blue, forget-me-not eyes and the largest dick in our part of Asia Minor. This pretty much sets the tone for the whole novel. The abundance of gratuitous sexual romping, much of it centred around Saint Paul, who is portrayed as a giggling, tap-dancing homosexual paedophile whose sexual predations Timothy accepts as part of the price he has to pay to see the world, is just one aspect of what has been seen by several reviewers as a sohomorish regression on Vidal's part. It is still unclear to me exactly why he has chosen to return through fiction to the early years of the Christian Church, when he had already satirised Christianity so formidably in the novels Messiah and Julian. Live From Golgotha is the fifth of what can be termed Vidal's religious novels, the others being Messiah (1954), Julian (1964), Kalki (1978), and Creation (1981). All of these are properly apocalyptic fictions, concluding as they all do with parodic teleological revelations. In Messiah, Vidal depicted the rise of an American-based world-wide death-cult as an allegorical critique of the processes by which religions become institutionalised, in a context of Cold War paranoia. Julian is a fictional biography of the fourth century Roman emperor labelled "the apostate" by posterity, because of his failed attempt to keep alive the pagan religions in defiance of the inexorable progression of Christianity. In Kalki, Vidal brings about the end of the world, through a megalomaniac Vietnam veteran who has proclaimed himself to be the tenth incarnation of the 0Nxc REI Volume 22, number 2, October 1995 Hindu god Vishnu. Creation is set in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., and has as its protagonist a Persian who meets Confucius and the Buddha, among many other historical figures, during the course of his quest to discover how the universe was created. In different ways, Messiah, Julian and Kalki each relates the story of the defeat of a powerful religion by a new and ruinous cult. In Julian, it is argued that none of the pagan cults either exhibited a strong missionary drive or attempted to exclude other cults, their capacity for tolerance accounting in part for their expunction by the absolutist religion of Christianity. In Messiah Christianity in turn has become democratised and weakened by its long reign and is thus vulnerable to the authoritarian cult of the mortician's assistant turned Messiah John Cave. This novel, Messiah, was Vidal's first "fifth gospel." The term "fifth gospel" was coined by Theodore Ziolkowski for a sub-genre of fictions which he describes as "fictional transfigurations of Jesus" in the ground-breaking book of that name. According to Ziolkowski, in "fictional transfigurations of Jesus" the characters and the action, irrespective of meaning or theme, are prefiguredto a noticeable extent by figures and events popularly associated with the life of Jesus as it is known from the Gospels. (6) Under the heading "fifth Gospel," Ziolkowski analyses Lars Gorling's 491, Gunter Grass's Cat and Mouse, John Barth's Giles Goat-Boy together with Vidal's Messiah. Ziolkowski argues that these texts approach the material of the New Testament with the detachment of non-belief. In all Vidal's religious novels, the crux of his demythologising intent is the distinction he urges between the known facts of the life of the person upon whom a religion is founded, and the kerygmatic metamorphoses of those facts. The theological term "kerygma," meaning "proclamation," connotes the religious significance attached to the historical facts concerning a person or event, particularly those facts recorded in the Christian Gospels. The theologian Rudolf Bultmann neatly sums up the issue of Christian kerygma as follows: As the synoptic tradition shows, the earliest Church resumed the message of Jesus and through its teaching passed it on. So for as it did only that, Jesus was to it a teacher and prophet. But Jesus was more than that to the Church: He was also the Messiah; hence that Church also proclaimed him, himself - and that is the essential thing to see. He who formerly had been the bearer of the message was drawn into it and became its essential content. The proclaimer became the proclaimed - but the central question is: In what sense? (33) Heather Neilson, "Live From Golgotha ". Vidal would answer that the veneration of the messenger necessarily results in the accretion of dogma which ultimately disfigures the message. As he perceives it, the chief enemy of the man Jesus and his message is Paul of Tarsus. In Messiah, the brash and unscrupulous publicity manager of John Cave is named Paul Himmel, and is a patent parody of the apostle Paul as arch- distorter of the word, although his role in the novel is conflated with that of Judas. Although someone else fires the gun which kills John Cave, it is effectively Paul who murders him, with the ambition of establishing once and for all the Cavite kingdom, just as the execution of Jesus ensured the perpetuation of the legend of the Christ. Cave's simple message of comfort, that death is not something to be feared, is transformed by his apostles into a fascination with death, and eventually the adherents of Cavite Incorporated are morally bound to end their lives by taking Cavesway, the Cavite term for suicide. Messiah, a revisionist gospel of Cavesword, is narrated by one of Cave's original followers, Eugene Luther, whose objections to the distortion of Cave's message after his murder had resulted in exile on pain of death. At the end of his life, Luther discovers that he has been written out of history, his contribution to the new religion attributed to someone else. Only at this time does he realise that Cave was meant to be the Fore-runner, a John the Baptist, and that he himself had been born to be the Messiah.
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